When I returned home, the Air Force decided they didn’t like me anymore. I had gone native and no longer shined my shoes after two years in the sticks. Hair was another issue which became a deal breaker. We parted company in February of 1973 and I went on to drive a cab for Lancaster, California Yellow Cab. That didn’t pan out so I went down to Bermite Powder Co. and applied for a job. Anyone could get a job there And you could meet babes.  I knew no one so this was the perfect social climber job.The other place across the way was Space Ordnance Systems (SOS). It’s title accurately described it. Explosives were their specialty but OSHA safety was several decades away. They used giant mixmasters  to combine lead azide ( a precursor to nitroglycerin). Lead azide was only marginally more stable that the nitro and the Santa Clarita canyon would resonate with a good, solid boom every time one of their mixers went up. They normally were crewed by three guys. Every time they had an explosion, the employment office would post in increments of three.

It was extremely dry and humidity was always low there. The conditions were perfect for making and mixing gunpowder. Unfortunately, those very same conditions caused a lot of static electricity to build up on things. If you reached to touch a piece of equipment, a spark always jumped across. We were all forced to wear a grounding bracelet that connected us to a ground wire. It looked like a leather wrist band with 4 feet of an 18 gauge wire than terminated in an alligator clip- quite handy as a roachclip in those days.

Due to the strenuous conditions and moving around large quantities of the azide meant disconnecting from the grounding system. Failure to “pre-ground” before coming in contact with the mixers was what caused a lot of SOS’ problems. The pay was the same at both places but Bermite was much bigger. This was the height of the Vietnam War. Business was booming at both joints and there was heavy turnover every time something went boom. Something about flying bodies turns off some people. Top pay over at Bermite was as a mechanic for $3.05/hr. That was my calling.

Bermite was building and assembling 60mm and 81 mm mortar flares. In addition,  they manufactured the 505 fuse assembly for 155mm artillery shells. The fuses had our old friend lead azide in them. On break one day in November 73, I watched a fellow take a large tray of these out of a bunker and begin to carry them into the assembly bunker. Bunkers were designed to send explosions vertically inside “explosion walls” to avoid blowing up other buildings adjacent. We all wore aprons to keep azide and magnesium powder from accumulating on our clothes. Nothing was done about shoes.

The fellow had his apron strings untied and tripped over one of them. The aftermath was predictable  He dumped the whole tray on the ground and the explosion obliterated him. We were 30 yards away and it parted our hair. He lasted about 5 minutes-not even enough time for the meat wagon to arrive.. This happened a lot. The 332 building assembled the rocket motors for Sidewinder missiles. It went up in smoke due to “unknown” just before I began working there. My future bride’s sister lost her new husband in that one and became an instant lotto winner for his SSI.

I worked mostly in the 335 building on the line drilling and pinning the tail cones onto the mortar bodies. We only had one scare when a guy dropped one at the end of the line and the propellant went off. It ignited a lot of spilled powder on the floor for 15 minutes and everyone bugged out. Well, almost everyone. I was the lead man on the line so I ran to the explosion. I wrapped my apron around the flare and ran outside dumping it in a half shell 55 gal. tub full of water. The magnesium hadn’t ignited or it would have been a wasted effort. I was almost demoted for that. I violated protocol by running in the wrong direction. I never even got a thank you Nod letter for saving 335.

We used to “requisition” the 81 mm candles and take them home for entertainment. They’d turn night into day for 5 minutes. You could put them in the old fashioned phone booths and slag them down to the pavement. We even took a bunch up to Barstow to my future intended’s 160 acre ranch and lit them off on their dry lake bed. I’m sure this is what prompted all the calls in about UFOs. Army choppers from nearby Fort Irwin would buzz the place for days afterwards.

There were mudpots on the southwest side of the lake. They were liquid vents of boiling mud much like quicksand. You could light a candle and toss them in by their steel parachute lanyard and make the pots belch like mud volcanoes.

The 505 fuses were a different story. There was no safe way to ignite them. My room mate Gary opened one with his trusty P-38 can opener and tried to light it with his Zippo. It  blew all the skin off the back of his hand and didn’t even make a decent boom. I had to drive him to the hospital because he went into shock. What a pussy.

My next door neighbors had a Christmas party and someone who worked in the slurry building had her feet up on the living room table. In the waffle stomper pattern of her boots was almost a pound of dried flare slurry. We dug it all out with car keys and filled the big ash tray on the table with it. It burned the ceiling when we finally got it to ignite. Young folks did stupid things way back then. Working around high explosives was, to me, an opportunity to get all kinds of neat stuff. The C-4 used to propel the 60 mm mortars was a case in point. If you collected enough of the little sewn-together sheets and made a pipe bomb out of it, you could almost send an upside down wheel barrow into orbit.

At a  2008 gun show meet in Puyallup, I spotted one of the 81mm candles for sale. The guy had no clue what he was holding. He took it back to his car after I explained what it was capable of. As you can see, Bermite went out of business in 1987- 14 years after I moved up to Seattle. The odds just weren’t in it to keep working at either outfit. You’d draw the short stick eventually and the money sucked. SOS didn’t fare any better. The best job at either outfit was EOD. We all volunteered for that. You’d drive from building to building in a company truck with a huge piece of braided metal hanging off the axle and touching the ground underneath to keep it grounded. At each building you’d collect all the damaged or misconstructed explosives and cart them to the disposal area in a remote canyon. We’d usually ignite it with a quarter stick of Dupont 40 stump dynamite and a 20 second quick match. Someone decide it was too dangerous so they switched over to detcord just before I left. Those were the good old days.

Here’s a picture of the Bermite Co. housing my future first wife was living in when I met her: